President Obama will be using taxpayer dollars to do what is effectively a campaign event tomorrow in North Carolina, not coincidentally a place which many consider to be a must-win state for him in next year’s election. While in the Tar Heel State, President Obama will be touting his new "Jobs Act," which entails another round of “stimulus, but don’t call it stimulus” spending in excess of $400 billion, mostly funded by tax increases. In a recent column in The Daily, the NRO’s Reihan Salam laid out some good reasons as to why Obama’s new proposal, in addition to being simply more of the same, is the wrong prescription:

On Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on energy companies –

“Incredibly, the president used a jobs speech to make the case against ‘tax loopholes for oil companies.’ To translate this into language we can all understand, the president is calling for increased taxes on drilling new oil and gas wells. This is despite the fact that we’ve only just unlocked vast amounts of domestic shale gas, an energy source that could reduce our dependence on oil imports and spark a jobs boom. If the central problem facing our country is that we have too many blue-collar jobs in the energy sector and that we rely too heavily on domestic energy sources, one could make a strong case for closing these tax loopholes. But if the opposite is true, as I think it is, this is a counterproductive step.”

On Obama’s continuation of class warfare by calling for higher taxes on upper income households –

“The president reminded us that very rich Warren Buffett thinks the rich should pay higher taxes, for which the Sage of Omaha has won great praise. Yet it is important to remember that Buffett, like all investors, pays corporate income tax through the companies he owns. These taxes eat into Buffett’s vast fortune, and that’s just fine with me. But corporate taxes also eat into the wages of workers. While the Congressional Budget Office assumes that 100 percent of the burden of corporate taxes fall on the Buffetts of the world, a conservative estimate is that at least 40 percent is borne by labor.”

Salam concludes that “On almost every front, the president seems to be moving the United States in the wrong direction.”

It’s also worth noting that the President’s dubious new jobs plan comes on top his FY ’12 budget proposal, which entails a massive tax increase on small businesses, who create 64% of new jobs and are the drivers of economic growth, which both North Carolina and the nation desperately need. Earlier this year I explained in The Daily Caller the toll Obama’s budget would have on small businesses from Cashiers to Cape Hatteras and how, unfortunately for North Carolina entrepreneurs, Gov. Bev Perdue’s treatment of job creators is no better:

“….under Obama’s budget proposal, the top marginal rate at which most small business profits are taxed would increase 13%, from a rate of 35% to 39.6%, yielding a $709 billion tax increase on individuals and small businesses over the next ten years…According to IRS data, of the 4.2 million individual income tax returns filed in North Carolina in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available), nearly 660,000 of them were small businesses, and that’s just sole proprietors.  Including the share of small businesses made up of S-Corps and partnerships, upwards of 825,000 small businesses file under the individual income tax system in North Carolina and would be adversely impacted by President Obama’s budget.  

Unfortunately for small businesses in the Tar Heel State, along with the hanging guillotine of higher taxes proposed by the White House, North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue has already hamstrung and taken her pound of flesh from employers, signing into law over a $1 billion in higher annual taxes, hitting small businesses with an individual income tax hike and the rest of the business community with an increase in the corporate rate.”

If that weren’t enough, Gov. Perdue is also running the White House ground game in North Carolina to prevent the legislature from blocking implementation of what many consider to be the most economically destructive policy to come out of Washington in the last two years – ObamaCare. To read more about Perdue’s efforts to ensure the implementation of ObamaCare and the $500 billion in higher taxes it entails, click here.